But the mesh is itself an abstraction, you just need to build that bridge.

We've been leaning away from pure polygons for decades, anyway. Vertex skinning, SDFs, volumetrics, simulation, and a lot more.

The meshes in a From Software game are for exmple hilariously simple, most of the animation is force simulation to make the famous "frizzles" that they like.

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cubefox 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Vertex skinning is essential for animation and it only works with polygons.

	▲	lopsotronic an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I'm not sure that's completely accurate? Vertex skinning isn't (necessarily) tied to polygons . . but to having points (or any parameterized features) that can be transformed by a weighted blend of matrices. The "vertex" in "vertex skinning" is really just "a thing with a position that gets moved." p' = Σ wᵢ · Mᵢ · p It's just a position. Triangles can come along for the ride downstream, but they're not essential, which is one of the reasons it's so efficient for some stuff. Polygons are the optimal surface - but surfaces are often extraneous. Take all this a few hefty grains of salt, I'm an amateur in the field. My 3d/CAD work is strictly in support of my enterprise stuff. And making wicked battlemaps for gaming VTTs, natch. But I will stand by the overarching statement that polygons are in fact an abstraction, and bridging that abstraction with whatever is in splats would be wicked awesome.